Gospel Prism

Tim Kurtz sent posted this link on our church forum on the stations of the cross from the ECM blog, “The Ooze.”  You’ll need Flash to see the art but it is so prototypical of the ECM.  Reader response and artistic interpretation become more important than authorial intent.  To quote Bob Dewaay in this Tim Challies book review, and then of course, Francis Schaeffer has much to add on the subject of post-modernity and faith:

The term ‘postmodern’ has come along to describe the results of the rejection of both reason and Scripture. We are left floating in a sea of subjectivism.” When we reject the idea of “true truth” or “total truth” we are left with nothing to rely on but mysticism - mystical experiences that can do for us experientially what Protestants have long believed that the Spirit, through Scripture, can and must do objectively.

Read Schaeffer’s words about what he called the “new theology.” “To the new theology, the usefulness of a symbol is in direct proportion to its obscurity. There is connotation, as in the word god, but there is no definition.” How could I help but be reminded of Orwell’s classic, 1984. “Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and now to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself - that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.”